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A response to Karadjis and Yarker

I want to respond briefly to two questions that were raised or asked about things I wrote on the national question in the former Yugoslavia. In the context of

Message 1 of 1
, Mar 26, 2004

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I want to respond briefly to
two questions that were raised or asked about things I wrote on the national
question in the former Yugoslavia.

In the context of my opposition
to the trial of Milosevic various other Serbs and others accused of war crimes
at the Hague, Michael asked whether I supported the incarceration of Pinochet by
the British at the order of a Spanish judge. The answer is no.
Pinochet was arrested in Britain while on a trip as a representative of the
Chilean government. This was a serious attack on Chile's sovereignty, and
this in my opinion was the main aspect of this move. It was an assertion
of crude imperialist domination in the name of "human rights." The demands
of various human rights fighters in Latin America for trials in Europe of the
criminals of the military regimes is an understandable response to the weakness
of their nations, and their inability to represent the people in punishing the
criminals, but basically I think the demands strengthen the hand of the
imperialists against the oppressed nations.

Fortunately, the class struggle
in Latin America is making progress in forcing the governments to lift the
various immunity guarantees that were given to the Pinochets of Chile,
Argentina, and other countries. This is the road I favor to the resolution
of these issues.

In that sense, the current wave
of "human rights" war crimes trials or demands and threats for such
"international" tribunals are different than the Nuremberg example which I also
cited. Basically, Nuremberg was part of the settling of accounts by the
victorious US and British imperialists with the imperialist powers who had
unsuccessfully contended with them for world domination -- Germany and
Japan. The basic framework of the trials was the punishment of German
and Japanese officials who had committed crimes in the pursuit of THEIR
illegitimate war. Since the victorious imperialists were assumed to have
waged a "just war," crimes like those in Dresden and Hiroshima -- not to mention
such things as the reoccupation of Vietnam and slaughter of Vietnamese
which was taking place during the trials -- were off the agenda by
definition.

In that sense, I have a certain
sympathy for the wide popular opposition in Serbia to the trial of
Milosevic and other Serb criminals and alleged criminals. There is an
element in these cases of resistance to imperialist domination, although it is
led in a Serb chauvinist direction by the reactionary forces that
dominate Serbia today (including the supporters of Milosevic). I feel the
same way about the response of Albanians to trials of their nationals, whether
guilty or not. The central issue overall in the Balkans in recent years
has been the reassertion of imperialist domination in an area from which they
had been largely pushed out for decades. The trials are part of
this.

The current spate of
trials is about imposing and tightening imperialist control over oppressed
nations -- which is how I regard Albania, Serbia, the Albanians of Kosovo and
all the other peoples of the Balkan region. This is also the issue in
imperialist demands for trials -- and for their "fair" control of trials -- in
the cases of figures from the Pol Pot government in
Cambodia.

Jim Yarker criticizes me for
favoring "unconditional self-determination" for the Albanians of Kosovo
today. I think I made it quite clear that my call for "unconditional"
self-determination was related to the present context and was not being made as
a moral absolute for all seasons. It is quite clear to me that there is no
alternative, from the perspective of unifying the workers and farmers of the
Balkans against imperialism and capitalist exploitation, to recognizing the
right of the Albanians in Kosovo to an independent Kosovo or unity with
Albania. Without recognition of the right to sefl-determination, there
will be no effective unity against imperialism in that region. The fact
that all the governments in the Balkans are today dominated by reactionary and
proimperialist forces doesn't modify that necessity.

Yarker raises the examples
of the Russian occupation of Georgia during the civil war of 1918-20
and, again during the civil war, the sending of troops to Poland in an attempt
to lend aid to the revolutionary forces in that country -- an incident which was
also very much part of the Civil War, in which imperialist forces were using
Poland as a counterrevolutionary base. I notice that these examples are
now being routinely used by some to justify cancelling out the right of
self-determination any time that oppressed nations are held to be led by
non-revolutionary or right-wing forces.

Georgia was an incident in a
vast civil war, and refusal to move on this would have simply been suicidal for
the Russian revolution. Most importantly, Lenin, Trotsky and other
Bolshevik leaders did not regard the occupation and expulsion of the
social-democratic government to cancel out or resolve the right of the people of
Georgia to self-determination. The following years saw a mounting struggle
over this issue between Lenin, Trotsky, and other revolutionaries on one
side and the conservatized bureaucratis stratum that Stalin
represented. Lenin saw recognition and implementation of Georgia's
national rights, including self-determination, as central to advancing the
revolution there. For useful information on this, see Lenin's Last Fight
published by Pathfinder in the United States.

In my opinion, the Russian
actions in Poland were not intended at all to be a suppression of Poland's right
to self-determination. Making gains in the Civil War, the Bolsheviks
estimated -- there were some differences among them about this -- that sending
Soviet troops into Poland would make it impossible for the Polish rulers to
defeat the revolutionary uprising that they believed would take place
there. There was no idea at all, even temporarily, of ruling Poland from
Moscow. The estimate turned out to be wrong and the invasion actually
strengthened the hand of the reactionary rulers of Poland who were able to force
territorial concessions from the Bolshevik regime. What was involved was a
revolutionary calculation that misfired, not a violation of
self-determination.

Contrary to what Yarker would
suggest, the Bolsheviks didn't at all oppose the right of self-determination in
cases where counterrevolutionary and reactionary forces were involved.
Finland was granted its independence by the new regime even though power fell
into the hands of the right, and the same thing was done in Estonia and
Latvia. The aim was to eliminate national oppression and occupation as
issues that could block solidarity between the revolutionary workers and
peasants of Russia and those of these countries.

At issue in all these cases was
the Russian revolution. Unfortunately, there was no revolution at stake in
the Balkans. What basically set off the breakup of Yugoslavia and the wars
was neither an imperialist plot nor a clash between revolution and
counter-revolution. What had taken place across the region (as in the
Soviet Union and the workers states) was the disintegration and collapse
of workers states as a consequence (in the context of imperialist world
dominance and growing capitalist economic difficulties worldwide) of decades of
Stalinist misrule.

Fred
Feldman

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